The website set new shipping records over the holiday season, that's always good for continued employment

I've been working to refactor the op(1) rulebase for the prod environment at work. Hundreds of developers, hundreds of projects, and re-orgs galore make priv delegation a complex task.Even if you take the time to factor the problem well.

Today I wrote 300 lines of shell code for "static.routes" the insane "where am I and how did I get in this handbasket?" /etc/init.d script we use at work. It figures out where you are, how you got there, how to get to all kinds of stub networks inside the DMZ, at OpCo's, or back on the corporate network. We recently added 2 business-logic networks (due to growth), and somebody had to do it.

I automated the generation of port-nat VIPs on our www-tier. Provided you reserve the IP addresses in the reverse zones, the forwards (sorted, coalated, and tasty) can be generated with perl. No more typeo's in 1000 lines of DNS from silly transcription errors.

I reviewd a draft of ptree(1) for FreeBSD written by my man, petef. Looking good.

My FreeBSD: kern/58497 feature request for security.jail.jid sysctl-knob was turned down for good reason. There's no reason to leak that into into the Jail, and you can obtain the info from sysctl, provided you're acquainted with the C-Compiler. The in/out of jail flag for my /etc/init.d/** is still kewl with ps/awk.

Marketing tried to add a bunch of javascript code to fetch hidden spyware images from hitbox.com. It was a big bust and broke a couple of applications in production. I should refrain from saying I told you so, because that would be rude in such a public forum.

I spend the evening reading, and re-reading parts of Daniel L. Schacter's excellent book: The Seven Sins of Memory -- How the Mind Forgets and Remembers. (ISBN: 0-618-21919-6) If I'd only known this much about the brain, encoding information into neural nets, and the memory pifalls that the unsuspecting person can fall victim to when I was younger.... I hightly recommend the book, especially as a follow-on to the Edward DeBono books on thinking as a skill (trust me -- you can improve).

I wrote some perl code today to emit canonical configratuons for the DMZ load balancers and firewalls based on our local site policy (and some clever invariants). Not somethig for the community, but I was happy with 100 lines of perl, that takes table definition and generates about 2000 lines of DNS, Firewall Rules, and Cisco Configruation. Lots of typing to get precisely right.

Went out for coffee with the wife this evening, and talked about frustraitons with 97th-percentile-disease, and relating to other people. Perhaps someday I'll get comfortable with being a member of a social species.

Order'd an eye-trainer from Bernell Corp since my fusional convergance/divergance has been bugging me. I'd have used this more as a kid if I understood what was going on like I do now.

I've been looking at software for speed-reading. If anybody reading this has suggestions, or experience here, drop me a line.